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an outsiders perspective on the supposed failure of BeReal

you may or may not have heard of the new-ish social media app called BeReal

the idea of the app is to break the "fakeness" of social media, like instagram or snapchat, where you can currate your posts in order to show everyone how cool you life is

BeReal only lets you post at a certain time, once a day, every day, at the same time as everyone else. you get a notification, you take your BeReal, you wait for all your friends to do the same and you see what they're up to

you can't see anyone elses post until you've posted your own

not an awful idea but in my opinion i don't feel it serves any real purpose other than a fun novelty.

I used BeReal for about a month, and my experience with it was just that it was boring! You realize using the app that everyones life is boring, which was the point, but that makes for a really lame social media experience

looking at dozens of pictures of awful looking meals, or stills from TV shows (family guy) covered in smudge, or an improptu selfie doesn't make for a compelling social media experience, in my opinion

it's silly, its simple, but ultimatly forgetable

I've seen a lot of my friends download and then immediatly delete the app, it just doesnt have any real longevity

however

instagram has recently introduced their own feature, very similar to that of BeReal. And that, in my opinion, signals the death of BeReal to me.

Why would anyone install BeReal when they already have instagram and all their friends are already on instagram

the way their implimentation of it works is that you send ur pic to a groupchat and no one else can see it until they post theirs. Not quite the same, doesn't have the same time w/ a notification thing but it's similar enough for me to call it that

I think this will just be another one of instagrams experiments though, i highly doubt they don't phase this out by end of the year

I very badly wanted to talk about how BeReal was some sort of penoptacon, where everyone was living their lives under constant fear of being BeRealed, living their lives in the most social media friendly way, unable to live in the moment, or be themselves, always worried about the eyes of the public

but BeReal isn't that, because no one cares about it